proper use of dump to backup a 5.3 box

[Jerry McAllister]

> 
> This is a follow up to a question I posted not long ago about the best way 
> to do a real, complete backup of a freebsd 5.3 box I'm using at home.  I 
> was looking at several options to do a complete backup so I could recover 
> my server (this is used at home for personal and development purposes) in 
> case of a hard drive failure or whatever.  Originally I was leaning towards 
> rsync'ing dumps to another older freebsd box I have at home but I just 
> decided to put a 120 gig Western Digital USB drive on the server and backup 
> to that instead of trying to do it over the network.
> 
> So I have this FAT32 120 gig drive connected to my P4 FreeBSD box that has 
> a 40 gig drive and it works great and everything.  I created a 
> /mnt/usbdrive directory for this drive and it's mounted successfully. In 
> the /mnt/usbdrive directory I have two 
> subdirectories:  /mnt/usbdrive/backups and /mnt/usbdrive/dumps.  I am using 
> the .../backups directory to do a daily backup of selected directories from 
> the P4 box and I want to put my dumps from the in the .../dumps 
> directory.  I read the man page for dump but I'm still a little unsure of 
> the proper way to use the command.  Can someone suggest the best way to 
> actually execute the dump? (what flags and options, etc).  Sorry if this is 
> n00bish I just want to do this right the first time.  I think this is the 
> syntax I should use the first time:
> 
> # dump -0u -f /mnt/usbdrive/dumps /

Almost, but that would attempt to write the dump to a file called dumps
in the /mnt/usbdrive/ directory.   Also, you want the the -a switch when
dumping to a file so it doesn't try to calculate media (eg tape) size
and ask for second and third tapes.   So, something more like

     dump 0auf /mnt/usbdrive/dumps/rootdump.20050510 /

might be what you want.   That would get you a dump of the whole root
filesystem.   If you have another file system such as /usr then a second
part like

     dump 0auf /mnt/usbdrive/dumps/usrdump.20050510 /usr

should be done, etc.

> 
> Will this dump the entire file system to the usbdrive?  I want to do a dump 
> once a month, what would the proper syntax be for doing an incremental dump?

If you are doing dumps once per month, don't bother with incremental dumps.
Do a full (level 0) dump each time.   Keep three and throw away any older.

To do a complete restore of the root file system, such as at a disk failure,
you will need to boot from some other media.  The fixit CD is a good
choice.   Download the CD 2 and keep it around somewhere safe for that
eventuality.

////jerry

> 
> Steve
>